Director's Cutfeatures interviews with the people behind today's best music videos.

What a difference a music video can make. Before the release of her dreamy and disorienting clip for Grimes' "Oblivion" earlier this year, Emily Kai Bock was just another film production student at Montreal's Concordia University. Since then, she's gained international representation and dropped out of school due to the rash of opportunities-- including more videos and a commercial for Coke-- suddenly coming her way. The "Oblivion" clip also caught the eye of Grizzly Bear's Ed Droste, who personally called Bock a few months ago, asking her to think up a treatment for the track "Yet Again".

Though she's had chances to direct for some high-profile bands recently, Bock has remained selective. "You have to be careful what you say yes to, because it's your art as much as it is theirs," she says. While other artists have balked at some aspects of her ideas-- "everyone wants to look cool," she says dryly-- Grizzly Bear was more open-minded. "When I originally pitched Ed the concept, his only feedback was: 'Make it crazier.' That was very different."

Shot in Toronto across two days in August, "Yet Again" follows a teenage figure skater as she goes on a surreal trip through her own adolescent fears...

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Pitchfork: What made you think of centering this video around a figure skater?

Emily Kai Bock: That image just popped into my head when I listened to the song, and then I thought about her falling through the ice-- it's like drawing a dot on a map, and then you are able to navigate from that point. I wanted to show that, for various types of performances, it's like you're walking on a tightrope, and you can mess up at any given moment. And that goes into the metaphor of feeling embarrassed and alienated and lost-- she ends up wandering around, and the skates become a burden. They're also scary-- these sharp knives this little girl's walking on.

Pitchfork: Do you have any history with figure skating yourself?

EKB: No. [laughs] My sister and mom used to watch, but I always thought it was really cheesy. It's more about growing up as a girl and struggling to learn how to gain acceptance and approval. At the beginning of the video, her hair is tightly pulled back and she's wearing perfect makeup, and I wanted to muddy that idea of perfection by having her stumble through the woods and get dirty. I definitely enjoyed the contrast between where you greet her and how you leave her, and how she's evolved.

I used to skateboard a bit and I remember being really annoyed by the girls on the sidelines who dressed up to flirt with the guys, who were actually getting sweaty and dirty and falling and scraping their knees. Putting on a performance to try to be the best you can be is like the adolescent struggle. It never really works out perfectly, and you fall, and then you learn that it's OK to stumble and get lost.

Pitchfork: Whose bedroom is that at the end of the video?

EKB: It's a room in my mom's house that I dressed up as a teenage girl's room. Those are actually the actress' metals from her figure skating days-- and when she walked into the room, she was like, "Wow, all my friends have these pictures on their walls." I had to tear up those magazines to put the pictures up, and it was very creepy. There's a lot of quizzes in these magazines, like, "What's your summer jam?" and there are three options: Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry, or someone else. It's very streamlined. Like: "This is what you listen to. This is how you dress. This is how you get a guy to like you."

As a teenager, you want to know who you are-- that is a huge void inside of you. So, to sell people this packaged idea of what they like and what they don't like is excellent marketing. It can be comforting when someone tells you how to be. But at the same time, it's like a doctrine, and it can be very oppressive. You get scorned for not liking something, or for not dressing a certain way. That's the really frightening thing about high school. Like: "You don't have the new iPhone?" or "You don't know about the new Justin Bieber?" [laughs] I shouldn't diss Bieber.

Pitchfork: I feel like you could say the same thing about underground culture-- every group has its own rules.

EKB: Absolutely. How do you be free? You can't. All you can do is scream in your room.

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Pitchfork: Earlier this year, you directed your first commercial, for Coke. As an artist, did you have to grapple with the idea of working for a big corporation?

EKB: Yes, absolutely. I naively believed that I would never go down that road. But then I started to research all my favorite directors, and they've all made ads-- even Wes Anderson. A lot of directors don't put their names on the commercials, so they can be hard to find. It's unfortunate, but that's how a lot of feature films are funded.

I didn't get paid a crazy amount for the Coke commercial, but it lasted me through the summer, and I was able to work on a few videos for free. If you find music that you really believe in, you see the artists struggling and you do not expect to be paid. It's like a collaboration. There's a weird line between art and commerce but, in a way, commercials will be made whether it's you directing them or someone else. And there are also some advantages with commercials, because you are able to have a very large budget and practice ideas you could administrate in a more creative film later. For the Coke commercial, it was my first time working with a professional crew, and that taught me a lot-- I went from working with one or two people to working with 40, which was a big shock. But then when it came to the Grizzly Bear video, we had a crew of 10. So if I had done the Grizzly Bear video directly after "Oblivion", I wouldn't have been as prepared.

Pitchfork: Are you proud of the commercial?

EKB: I'm proud considering what was possible under the limitations, but I wouldn't say that it represents me as an artist. I mean, what you can do for a brand is very narrow because everything has to be pre-approved by the client, and Coke has a pretty strict image. And that's very different. When you're working with a band you have to tell them every idea you have, but you can be a little more badass.

Pitchfork: Would you consider making a video for a band you didn't really like?

EKB: I feel that music video is an awesome medium that I want to have integrity over. Actually, I was having this conversation with [Arcade Fire's] Win Butler, who hangs out in Montreal. It was the first time I met him, at a Grimes show, and I was like, "I don't know what to do, because I got pitched a bad song by a bad band, but it's a huge budget, and I can make a cool video." And he's like, "Have you ever seen a good video for a bad song?" And I was like, "Um..." They don't exist. A lot of it is about the music being able to inspire the director-- as long as you're able to pay to eat, it's not worth making a lot of money just to put out crap.